Krazy Baldhead

KRAZY BALDHEAD is one of the Ed Rec crew’s accomplished musicians: he spent ten years at the Conservatory practicing electronic instruments, but also the piano, guitar, bass and percussion. This is an artist who didn’t hesitate to go off to India to practice the tabla and infuse himself with their hypnotic rhythms for four months.

His musical influences are also very wide in spectrum: Joy Division and Gong, Bartok and Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix and Squarepusher.

With his first salary as an engineer KRAZY BALDHEAD bought his first machines and started exploring new sounds. While Fatboy Slim and Warp were doing their thing, he left the hi-tech world to concentrate only on the music. In 2004 he sent a demo to Pedro Winter, then manager for Daft Punk, who had just created his label Ed Banger. The abstract and heavy beats of his ‘Bill’s Break’ became the label’s fourth release. He also did a number of remixes for his friends dDamage, Aufgang, Plugs, Outlines and Pitchben. Humble and discreet, sometimes swimming against the fashionable currents, his ‘musical family’ is nevertheless very determined and atypical on the dynamic French electro scene.

His debut album The B-Suite was released in 2009, with the single ‘Sweet Night’ featuring Irfane from the Outlines, giving his first appearance on Ed Banger. The format was an ambitious one: an ‘electronic symphony’ in four movements with electronic sounds built over a classical structure. He also illustrated encounters that he made while on tour (the Brooklyn rapper Tes, Big-O from Japan and Mademoisselle Yulia, and Outlines and Beat Assaillant from Paris). The album was unanimously praised and confirmed Krazy as a special planet in the Ed Rec galaxy.

Depending on his mood, his music can be somber and melancholy or experimental, and with no warning slide into a warm almost poppy funk. His comps can be either built on a classical or jazz base, with funky synths and organic electro sounds, mostly with powerful bass lines inspired by British bassmusic.

For his second album The Noise in the Sky, KRAZY BALDHEAD delved into his 70s influences: while on tour for The B-Suite, he traveled by day listening to 70s jazz and played by night in electro clubs and festivals. While in Detroit to play at the DEMF festival, he visited the historic Motown studios in Hitsville USA and realized the duality of his musical position: influenced on one side by 70s sounds and being part of the Ed Banger label; in his studio, vintage Moogs and Rhodes share the space with an Ableton computer and its plug-ins: he questioned himself on this duality and endeavored to find a musical answer. The result is absolutely contemporary, but also influenced by a branch of the 70s culture, building bridges between Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters and Amon Tobin, between Weather Report and Skream.

On stage, KRAZY BALDHEAD plays live with machines, keyboards and pedals giving a different result every night. For his new tour, he has surrounded himself with videos created by Flashback, who also directed the video for ‘Surabaya Girl’, which followed a multicolored windmill through Paris. (PS: KRAZY BALDHEAD is not only Ed Banger’s mad bald genius, he is also the creator/producer of the band Donso, a mix between Malian traditional music and electro, proof of his broad taste in music – Donso’s album was released in 2010 on Comet Records).